Innholdsfortegnelse for May 2017 i Popular Mechanics

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When it comes to craft spirits, the word local has different meanings. It can indicate proximity—how close the distillery is to where you live. It can mean indigenous, like rye in Pennsylvania or rum in Boston. Local sometimes references sourcing practices—distillers source ingredients from area farmers, sometimes even collaborating to create heirloom grains for the mash that becomes a spirit’s base. And then there is the top rung of the local ladder: the water. “There’s no overvaluing the part water plays in distilling,” says Jeff Lindauer, who runs Spring44, a distillery in Loveland, Colorado. “An 80-proof bottle is 40 percent alcohol and 60 percent water. So even after all the ingredient sourcing and careful craftsmanship, it’s water that deeply affects the final spirit—particularly clear spirits like vodka and gin that…

INGREDIENTS DOUGH • 5 cups cricket flour, plus more as needed • 2 tbsp kosher salt • 2 tbsp sugar • 1 tbsp baking powder • 1 tbsp baking soda • 10 oz (1 1/4 cups) cold lard • 1 1/2 cups buttermilk EGG WASH • 2 extra-large eggs • 2 tbsp sugar I DIRECTIONS 1 Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper. 2 To make the dough: In a big bowl, mix the first five ingredients. Mix it real good. Start tearing off chunks of lard and massage them into the flour—you want the flour to become sandy, with small chunks of lard. Pour in the buttermilk and gently massage the dough until it’s just formed. It should be lumpy. 3 Flour a…

A. CRKT Homefront BLADE LENGTH: 3 1/2 inches Extremely sharp and sturdy, with much more heft than the other options. The Homefront is designed to be field-stripped (disassembled) and cleaned without tools. Nice if you’re gutting a fish. $150 B. Milwaukee Hardline 48-22-1994 BLADE LENGTH: 3 inches A solid general-purpose knife with good weight and a slim profile. The small tab on the back of the blade makes this the easiest of the four to flick open. $70 C. Coast LK375 BLADE LENGTH: 3 ¾ inches The handy built-in flashlight adds some bulk, which gives you a more comfortable grip. This was the best knife for cutting tough plastic tubing. The base of the blade is serrated, but better to avoid that part. It’s a little too coarse, requiring a…

The Russian-made Ural motorcycle is a threewheeled movie star. The bike can’t go anywhere without getting some attention, whether it’s from the motorhead in the parking lot, the woman who wants to sit in the sidecar, the nice older couple who offer you free coffee because they think you’re driving around the world, or the toll-booth collector who won’t let you ride on without answering a bunch of questions. Kids stare, men and women take photos with their phones, drivers accelerate to pass and give a hearty thumbsup. People connect with the bike. It’s like they’re interacting with a piece of history—and they are, sort of. I’m riding a 2016 model, but the original Ural dates back to the Eastern Front during World War II. The Russians needed reconnaissance and…

Romey David’s crawfish boil starts at noon the day before. That’s the time David gets home from his job checking oil wells and starts baiting his 350 traps. He’ll use 150 pounds of frozen baitfish, sliced into halves for the north pond, and whole fish for the south. And for over two hours, he’ll run his flat-bottomed boat up and down the two ponds, dropping a piece in each wire cage. The next day, around the same time, he takes his boat back out to empty the traps. Harvesting is like baiting in reverse—pulling each trap out and dumping the handful of crawfish onto a sorting tray and tying them up in mesh sacks. A good day fills eight sacks (his record is eighteen), each with about thirty-four pounds of…

Like most two-year-olds, my son has a handful of words he can say clearly, but no phrases. Recently, we got a Google Home, Google’s version of the Echo speaker. Every time we say, “Okay Google” to turn on music, he stops, and his eyes light up. He sees how much we talk to it, and he’s started treating it like it’s family. He checks on it after his nap. He blows it kisses and offers it his stuffed animals. I joked that his first clear words were going to be “Okay Google” and I’m not far off. He hasn’t quite gotten the “Okay” part, but he’s nailed “Google.”…

The Poly Prep Country Day School chapter of Girls Who Code meets on Wednesdays in Brooklyn in New York. As the sound of the bell fills a technology lab in the middle of campus, girls bob in in twos and threes. The lab looks much like a modernized woodshop, with blue rubber flooring, wheeled work tables, metal rolling stools, and a tool wall. There are eleven girls today. Most are high school underclassmen, though the youngest is a seventh grader and the oldest is a senior. Some have been part of GWC all year; others just began last week, at the beginning of the spring semester. The girls gather around tables and pull out their laptops, many of them decorated with stickers. Girls Who Code is a national nonprofit with…

A / SLOW U-235 is the enriched uranium isotope. It’s easily split by a neutron moving at slow speed. When the neutron hits the uranium atom, the atom divides into two fission products and releases two to three neutrons. One of those neutrons might be absorbed by unenriched uranium, U-238. One might hit another U-235 atom to continue the chain reaction. And most others will leak out and no longer contribute to the process. Enriched U-235 atoms must be added to continue the reaction. If too many U-238 atoms are present, the reaction will die. B / FAST Neutrons in fast reactions move much more quickly because they use liquid metal sodium as coolant instead of water. Sodium atoms are heavier than the atoms in water, so neutrons bounce off…

Do long-haul truckers carry guns for protection on the road? Who wants to know? Are you a cop? Or maybe you’re a crook. Either way, the answer is yes, some drivers carry firearms, but they’re sure as shootin’ not going to tell you about it. They will tell us, though—so long as we don’t publish their last names. “I’ve carried a handgun since 1982,” says Chris, a driver from Lancaster, Ohio. “I haven’t had an issue with it because I don’t let anybody know I have it.” That’s wise, for a few reasons. For one, some employers forbid drivers from carrying as a matter of policy. Moreover, anybody driving around the country with a loaded, accessible handgun would find it nearly impossible to avoid violating the law. “Any situation you…

When I was 16—six long years ago—I dragged up a record player I found in my parents’ basement along with a collection that had a few too many Doobie Brothers albums to have me believe my father had truly never tried pot. It smelled weird and some of the records were scratched, but damned if I didn’t sit there listening for the next three hours. Pulling a record out of its battered sleeve, I could interact with an unimaginable version of my father, a young one. I felt like I was reading his old letters—or anyone’s letters, back when people kept letters. (The internet has made communication faster, but how many love emails do you have in a box under your bed?) And yet “nostalgic” is no longer a fair…

Email your home and yard questions to askroy@ popularmechanics.com and watch for Roy’s answer in an upcoming column. Q. Are repair kits for sagging wood gates any good? DAVE G. , SCOTTSDALE, ARIZONA A. Anti-sag kits range in price from $12 to $30, and they make a perfectly good repair on small- to medium-size gates. Most consist of two to four corner braces, a turnbuckle, cable, and fittings. The cable runs diagonally across the gate with the turnbuckle in the center. Tightening the turnbuckle tensions the cable, lifting the low corner of the gate. If the gate is large—say, wide enough to drive your lawn tractor through— you’re better off with something a bit more substantial. Have a look at the rugged steel kits from Hoover Fence Co. Its heavy-duty…

After my thirteenth birthday, I had a lot of gift cards from my friends and family. I always loved putting things together and finding out how engines work, so I figured the Iglobalbuy 50CC 2 Cycle Petrol Gas Engine Motor Kit for Motorized Bike would be the perfect thing for me. This kit will fit on any 26-inch or 28-inch bicycle, so I decided to install the kit on a 26-inch Fuji Thrill bicycle that no one in my family rode anymore. The kit turns any ordinary bicycle into a super-fast gas-powered machine. When I started putting the kit together, I realized that there were some metal shavings in the gas tank, and if those got into the engine they could cause major problems. I highly recommend if you get…

BLUETOOTH SNE AKERS . WI-FI GRILLS . We laughed, too. For a while. Then, over the last couple of years, wireless technology quietly improved. Designers created shapes that we would actually display in our house. Setup time for speaker systems went from hours to minutes. Most importantly, inventors started making devices that connected to the internet—and to each other—in meaningful ways. Ways that could make you and your everyday life more efficient. More capable. More powerful. And maybe even happier. But—of course there’s a but—there’s so much of this new smart stuff out there, it’s getting harder to know what you need and what’s just dumb. We tested a wide array of the items that make up the Internet of Things, and we have some answers for you.…

MY WIFE REGINAand I woke to a sharp burst of simulated sunlight coming from the alarm clock. Ten minutes later, it emitted a weird series of notes, like outtakes from a Philip Glass composition. I didn’t expect that. The night before, when Regina paired the Beddi clock with her phone and set up the app, it filled our bedroom with pleasant forest sounds for twenty minutes before we slept. But the next day, it went for experimental classical. She didn’t seem amused, but I was delighted. I’ve always wanted to wake up in the future. I got up groggily and moved toward the bathroom. The smart lightbulbs and plugs had pre-lit the rest of the house, just as I’d instructed them to, using their respective apps. I’d also set them…

THERE ARE criminals out there looking to exploit smart thermostats and Wi-Fi cameras. Hackers can remotely disable a thermostat and demand a ransom to return it to working order, or gather sensitive information about its owner. It’s the risk of anything wireless and convenient. Cybersecurity researchers fight back by dissecting smart hardware and finding weaknesses for manufacturers to fix before the bad guys get wise. We asked a few of these researchers to assess whether some common smart appliances left their figurative doors unlocked. Ryan Speers and Gene Chorba work at Ionic Security in Atlanta. The company specializes in encryption, intelligently scrambling data so that only the intended recipient can see the information. Its clients include the Department of Homeland Security, making Speers and Chorba overqualified but enthusiastic about assessing…

DANIELLE FEINBERG WHO SHE IS Director of Photography at Pixar A PROGRAM SHE LEARNED TO GET THERE Maya Toy Story didn’t come out until my senior year of college, but as a junior, one day my computer graphics professor showed a Pixar short film. I knew then that was exactly what I wanted to do. In a regular live-action movie the director of photography does camera and lighting. In animation, I’m in charge of adding the lighting to the three-dimensional worlds we build movies in. It’s the last creative step: The world is built, the characters are animated, and I add lights. I can make a scene look indoors or outdoors, overcast or sunny, fluorescent or candlelit. One important program we use at Pixar is called Maya. It helps our…

MATERIALS LIST • 1 x 6 x 12–inch white pine board • 3/8 x 48–inch round wood dowel • Wire coat hanger • 2 ¾-inch pan-head wood screws • Optix 0.08 x 8 x 10–inch clear acrylic sheet • Nerf Rival refill-pack foam balls • 10 golf tees (two colors) • Sandpaper TOOLS • Miter saw • hand miter saw • drill • 3/8", 3/16", 1/16", ¼" twist drill bits • ¾" spade bit • jigsaw • wire-cutting pliers • tape measure • wood glue • pencil • marker DIRECTIONS KID PARENT PARENT AND KID 1 Use a miter saw to cut the 1 x 6 x 12 into lengths of 4 1/2 inches, 4 inches, and 1 1/2 inches. Knock off any rough edges with sandpaper. 2 The 4…

STEP 1 Lay out a bundle of items to be wrapped, then pay out rope perpendicularly across it. STEP 2 Wrap the rope around the bundle to create three loops. STEP 3 Shift the first loop of rope over the second loop. STEP 4 Shift the new first loop over the other two, and then over the end of the bundle. STEP 5 Pull the ends of the rope tight. Tie them off with a simple knot, if needed.…

LOCATION: Columbia University Medical Center, New York City The immune system is kind of like a diary. You can take the blood of a Lyme disease patient two, five, or maybe even ten years down the road and find antibodies against the disease. An issue surrounding Lyme disease is the persistence of symptoms following an infection, called post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome. My lab compares immune responses of patients without symptoms to those who do not recover fully. We take blood samples and map which parts of proteins from the diseasecausing bacteria antibodies bind to. One test is called a protein/peptide microarray (1). We print 1,000 protein segments onto a small metallic chip and test them all against a patient sample. Another test, called an ELISA, exposes important segments to lots…

Jamie Hyneman stood on a lawn in Fairfax, California, an hour north of San Francisco, staring at an overgrowth of French broom, a yellow-flowered evergreen weed, and potato vine. At his feet: an off-the-shelf DJI Inspire quadcopter onto which he has bolted a pair of automated pruning shears. Hyneman, of course, was, for 14 years, half of the MythBusters, two men of extraordinary resourcefulness who investigated various phenomena using their expertise in engineering, special effects, and physics. The show ended, but Hyneman kept building, which accounts for the drone before him. A couple of years ago, he noticed that the foliage behind his house in San Francisco was so overgrown that it compromised his view of the Golden Gate Bridge. But even he couldn’t see a way to prune it.…

The right photograph of the right car at the right moment casts a spell. Just looking at this one by Lee Friedlander makes you want to put your hands on the wheel and drive—past roadside attractions, tumbledown motels, and gas stations plucked from a Steve McQueen movie. Friedlander’s picture, along with 500 others taken by some 100 photographers, appears in what may be the most ambitious exhibit of car-focused photography ever: Autophoto, opening this month at the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art in Paris.* Aside from flat-out beautiful images, the show considers how the histories of photography and cars are intertwined. “The growing popularity of the car dramatically transformed the landscape in unexpected ways,” says Philippe Séclier, the show’s co-curator. “Highways and parking structures popped up, so did road signs,…

Briggs & Stratton 020655 A good all-around sprayer for the suburbs that’s lightweight and easy to move, with a protective frame and a low profile that helps it tuck away for garage storage. We gave it points for general sturdiness, wide tires, and pivot-friendly weight distribution. DISLIKES: The hose is stiff and the frame needs a better mechanism to hold the gun when not in use. $450 Craftsman 020573 With a fold-down handle and bottommounted pump, the Craftsman has the smallest footprint of the washers we tested. We also liked the cleverly designed tip on its spray wand, which lets you rotate the nozzle ring to one of five positions: soap, delicate, general, max, and flush. It means no more worrying about losing tips. You just have to keep the…

I used to live above a record store. Revolution Records, on 8th Street in New York City. My friend Pete and I spent many afternoons in there, flipping through the stacks, our eyes reading the titles as fast as our fingers could flip. We’d take our goods back to my apartment and fire up the Califone portable record player I’ve had since my tenth birthday. The moments are indelible to me even now: Bill Evans, “Waltz for Debby,” pouring rain, bourbon. The weird, alive opening horns of “Mango Meat,” by Mandrill, a record (Just Outside of Town) that we judged (correctly) by its amazing cover. Astral Weeks, by Van Morrison, whose voice was made for vinyl. I’ve got a new turntable now, and more records. A few thoughts on starting…

I WANT TO BE in my car, on the way home, and be able to say, “Put my AC back at 68, heat the kettle, and turn on ESPN.” This is what I’ve always dreamed about, and it’s finally happening. I’ve had an Amazon Echo, the voice-assistant speaker, since it first came out in 2014. I started out just asking it for weather and sports scores. Now, companies are designing hardware that lets you control it by talking to the Echo. It’s so much more natural than unlocking your phone, opening an app, and sliding a switch just to turn on your reading light. With the Philips Hue lightbulbs, I can tell the Echo to turn the lights on and off, or turn on a scene— Bright, Relax, Energize, Arctic…

SPRING, 2010: I’m driving a new Lincoln MKT EcoBoost in Boston’s Beacon Hill neighborhood when I spy a parking spot. I pull past and put the car in reverse, initiating the familiar dance of the urban parallel park. Except now, for the first time in my life, my hands aren’t on the wheel. Ultrasonic sensors on the bumper measure the space and tell a computer, which calculates the angles for a perfect park. That data goes to the power-steering motor, which smoothly whipped the wheel to the right, then left, placing the big Lincoln within ten inches of the curb. A woman on the sidewalk, witnessing this sorcery, called out, “Did that car just park itself? That’s the coolest thing I’ve ever seen!” Indeed, it seemed that way. A few…

BY THE GOOD HOUSE KEEPING INSTITUTE . . . REFRIGERATOR? You don’t need one that’s just a tablet stuck on the exterior. But interior cameras make sense. When you’re at the grocery store, you can check your phone to see if you have eggs. That solves a real problem that hasn’t been solved in any other way. Someday, we’ll see a smart refrigerator that can track our food and warn about bacteria, or one that can use AI to move the oldest food to the front. —Sharon Franke . .WASHI NG M ACHINE ? Right now, the functions are basic, like remote start or downloadable cycles. The newest ones order detergent when the dispenser is near empty, and run when household energy use is low. The most useful: remote diagnostics.…

The repairman’s advice: Buy the dumbest appliances you can find. IATTENDED THE Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in 2011. It’s the world’s largest trade show, with hundreds of new products introduced each year. What I saw were booths stuffed with future landfill: docks, dashboard mounts, adapters, robotic vacuum cleaners, 3D TVs. One afternoon, I attended a panel discussion about the rapidly approaching “connected home,” referred to nowadays as the Internet of Things. The panelists promised that household devices of all kinds would soon be connected to one another and to the internet, thereby transforming the average American home into a futuristic fortress of hyperefficiency. Many of the predictions sounded familiar, so while the panelists were talking I did a Google search on my phone and found this New York…

FROM Sheryl Sandberg, Chief Operating Officer, and Mike Schroepfer, Chief Technology Officer, Facebook TO Women Dear Reader, At Facebook, we develop technologies that make the world more open and connected. Today, billions of people come together on platforms like Facebook and Instagram, and in the future new technologies such as artificial intelligence and virtual reality will open up entirely new ways to connect. But as we build all these technologies, it’s critical that our team understands and reflects the variety of genders, communities, ages, races, nationalities, backgrounds, and cultures that use Facebook. We believe a diverse workforce will help deliver a better product today and in the future—not just for us, but for any technology company or organization. To build a diverse technology industry, it’s important to leverage cognitive diversity…

Rubber Band Solves Ceiling-Fan Woes It’s a real hassle when the vibrations of a ceiling fan shake loose the screws that hold the globe of the fan’s light fixture in place. Reader Maxine Cutshall of Willowick, Ohio, came up with a clever solution— she wrapped a rubber band around the groove that receives the screws. The rubber absorbs the vibrations and introduces just enough friction to keep the screws in place. FOIL WI-FI SCAMMERS One way the hackers can hack you is by setting up Wi-Fi networks and giving them names, like “Google Starbucks” or “attwifi,” that your device is used to seeing. Thinking it’s a legitimate network, the device automatically connects and, voilà, the bad guys have an in to the data on your computer or phone. The easiest…

p. 1 “Battle of New York”: Mark Peterson; “Gender Gap”: Molly Matalon; pp. 35, 37 prop stylist: Peter Tran/Art Department; p. 36 guitarist: Getty Images; p. 38 Bleecker Street Records: Robert K. Chin; p. 60 kid with bike: Deana Bell/490 Photo; pp. 64–67 stylist: Mimi Cordray; p. 79 clock: Getty Images; p. 90 Sandberg, Schroepfer: Getty Images. POPULAR MECHANICS (ISSN 0032-4558) is published monthly except for combined July/August and December/January, 10 times a year, by Hearst Communications, Inc., 300 West 57th Street, New York, NY 10019 U.S.A. Steven R. Swartz, President & Chief Executive Officer; William R. Hearst III, Chairman; Frank A. Bennack, Jr., Executive Vice Chairman; Catherine A. Bostron, Secretary. Hearst Magazines Division: David Carey, President; John A. Rohan, Jr., Senior Vice President, Finance. ©2017 by Hearst Communications, Inc.…